renaissance

The true Renaissance person is endowed with panoramic attention.... The habit of noticing the ensemble of everything and its constituent parts is a matter of will, not of innate aptitude. It involves the conscious noticing of things and the gaps that separate and connect them.

[how can anyone] be silly enough to think himself better than other people, because his clothes are made of finer woolen thread than theirs. After all, those fine clothes were once worn by a sheep, and they never turned it into anything better than a sheep.

I shower in the dark, barely able to tell soap from conditioner, and tell myself that I will emerge new and strong, that the water will heal me.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to carry on that counts.Winston Churchill

It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.

Man is mortal. This is his fate. Man pretends not to be mortal. That is his sin. Man is a creature of time and place, whose perspectives and insights are invariably conditioned by his immediate circumstances.

In the darkness, fear my light.

Killing, raping and looting have been common practices in religious societies, and often carried out with clerical sanction. The catalogue of notorious barbarities _ wars and massacres, acts of terrorism, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the chopping off of thieves_ hands, the slicing off of clitorises and labia majora, the use of gang rape as punishment, and manifold other savageries committed in the name of one faith or another _ attests to religion__ longstanding propensity to induce barbarity, or at the very least to give it free rein. The Bible and the Quran have served to justify these atrocities and more, with women and gay people suffering disproportionately. There is a reason the Middle Ages in Europe were long referred to as the Dark Ages; the millennium of theocratic rule that ended only with the Renaissance (that is, with Europe__ turn away from God toward humankind) was a violent time.Morality arises out of our innate desire for safety, stability and order, without which no society can function; basic moral precepts (that murder and theft are wrong, for example) antedated religion. Those who abstain from crime solely because they fear divine wrath, and not because they recognize the difference between right and wrong, are not to be lauded, much less trusted. Just which practices are moral at a given time must be a matter of rational debate. The 'master-slave' ethos _ obligatory obeisance to a deity _ pervading the revealed religions is inimical to such debate. We need to chart our moral course as equals, or there can be no justice.

We've never heardAbout a marvel quite so great,For all the heroes who have livedIn history can't measure upIn bravery against the Maid.

Whose little boy are you?

PASSIONS are likened best to floods and streams: The shallow murmur, but the deep are dumb;

L'honneste est stable et permanent.

D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action.

L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage.

Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.

Je hay entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté, et par nature et par jugement, comme l'extreme de tous les vices.

Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché _ l'homme quelque instinct _ l'inhumanité

Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes.